Argent

Well, I've already expressed my excitement over both, especially Jasnah. I'll try to come back with some feedback later because it's hard to come up with anything other than "perfect" right now. And scrap & WIPs, I know I would love to see them.

See that picture above the letter? The one that says "A HappyPlace Original"? It means the site - HappyPlace - created this. Martin didn't write it. EDIT: BAM!

Brandon is shady like that.

Well, finished The Republic of Thieves, third and last published book in Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series. Very pleased. Finally started The Blinding Knife, #2 in Brent Weeks' Lightbringer series. I loved the first book and people are telling me this one is just as good, if not better, so I am having some expectations. I've been eyeballing Brian McClellan's Promise of Blood and David Hair's Mage's Blood for my next read. I think those two will conclude my list of books I've been wanting to read for the past half year or so.

Might as well get rid of "possible" - this is a thread discussing the content of the book, almost everything will be ridden with spoilers.

A bit of an update with some release dates. Mistborn: The Well of Ascension (1/3) comes out on August 1, 2014. No art yet. If they do a cycle similar to The Final Empire, we should expected parts 2 and 3 a month apart, so September 1 and October 1. Certainly excited about all this.

Makes sense in the context of the theory - Sel and Roshar both have a lot of free(-ish) Investiture (some) people can pick up and work magic with; Scadrial's Investiture is kept mostly within its Shards, and people who want to use it need a conduit to the Shards to access it.

I keep thinking of them as a former court whose remnants are now (part of the) Wyldfae. But I really have no idea where those impressions came from, a couple of quick searches just now did nothing to refresh my memory. According to lore they were kind of banished, so maybe that's why.

I believe it has been confirmed that Seekers experienced enough can differentiate between any kind of active Investiture. In short, they can tell whether or not two people are using Investiture from the same Shard (e.g. if a Mistborn Steelpushes a piece of metal out of the room and a Surgebinder Lashes it to the same effect, a Seeker would be able to tell that they access different Shards) whether or not two people are using different powers of the same Shard (e.g. burning different metals, using different Surges, etc) I don't think just holding Stormlight counts as Investing - though it might. If it does, I imagine you'd need a very powerful Seeker to even detect that, and even they they would probably only detect that this person has more (innate) Investiture than others, kind of like how Awakeners have more life force.

Looks like it's fan art.

I was under the impression that the Tuatha were, essentially, another court - or unaligned with Winter or Summer, if you prefer it that way.

I remember Mary's and Dan's, but wasn't sure if those were the stories they planned to use. Pretty excited to see Mary's worldbuilding there.

Maybe, but then it becomes more about the worlds themselves, not the characters or the plots. Which is fine, in a way, but it's a noteworthy difference.

The end, the part about the "Spiritual fuel," doesn't resonate with me quite so well, but I mostly agree with the rest. I expected to see more math though

Yea, would've been really sweet if we can do one skin per book, or per series, or something like that...

Neat! Do we know what the rest of the team will be writing about?

This just showed up in my Facebook feed. I can remember where I've seen the central logo / sigil, but if the leaf shapes were converted into diamonds (obviously without the circle around them), it could turn into another interpretation of the Ghostbloods tattoo.

io9 actually - then on reddit.

This article popped in my RSS feed a little earlier today. I can't think of an actual use for this information, but it's neat to look at.

Aaah, you put me in the bad neighborhoods of Chicago! Bad Aether, bad. Update me to Skokie, IL if you must, it's more accurate than just Chicago.

Okay, I see a couple of misconceptions I can clear up here. The Heralds wield a special form of Shardblade call Honorblades (one of their abilities being to grant Surgebinding powers to their wielder). Honorblades are not and do not have spren, and because of that people, Heralds included, do not bind with them the same way Shardbearers bind with their Blades. The screams Surgebinders / Radiants in training hear when they touch Shardblades are the screams of the spren that is the Shardblade - but they wouldn't hear anything if they touched an Honorblade, because there is no spren there to make the screaming. So. Dalinar reportedly didn't hear any screaming when he bonded Taln's Blade - but that's because the Blade he bonded with was not an Honorblade, it wasn't Taln's actual weapon. We've had a few discussions and pieces of evidence about this, but there are two main points of interest: #1 the description of the Blade Taln shows up before the gates of Kholinar doesn't match the description of the one Dalinar wields and bonds with; and #2, Dalinar's Blade does scream when he actually forms a Nahel bond with the Stormfather, which means it has to be a Shardblade, a what I call dead Sprenblade. The reason he doesn't report screams before that point is because he didn't have the bond before - at least it wasn't strong enough to allow him to feel anything more than just general unease. @curi does make a very good point about Nightblood's uniqueness though. Vasher's sword is not special in the grand scale of things, it's special by virtue of consequences. Given what we know about the similarities between Nightblood and the Honorblades, I have to wonder whether the Heralds' swords were created with both the same means and goal in mind - created by Investing regular swords with a ton of Stormlight and then given a Command, or a task, or an Intent, or something like that. It doesn't seem like they are Invested enough to gain semi-consciousness (which matches the WoB about Nightblood being more powerful by orders of magnitude), but... I don't even know where to take it from here. I guess it's just a neat way things connect.

I must've missed the part about the overlap. I always imagined it as the symbol used for section breaks within a chapter.

It's how I choose to interpret it in the lack of further evidence.

I must admit, $45 for that seems a bit excessive. I will consider it, but the thing better be a damnation jewel.